How Personalized Retargeting Can Optimize Your B2B Ads

This year, one of your top marketing priorities should be to take a long, hard look at your digital advertising strategy. Where is it working — and more importantly, where isn’t it working? Current digital advertising methods make it difficult to generate qualified sales leads with anywhere close to a reasonable cost-per-lead. At the same time, personalization and retargeting have become increasingly popular (although separate) strategies for both outbound and inbound marketing, and now marketers can apply those strategies to digital advertising.

Personalized emails have been shown to increase click-through rates by 14% and conversions rates by 10%. According to the most recent Chango Retargeting Barometer, one in five marketers already has a dedicated budget for retargeting, and over 50% of marketers plan to increase their retargeting budgets in 2014.

If you don’t have a retargeting budget, let’s take a moment to define retargeting, and explain why you might incorporate retargeting into your marketing mix. Retargeting is a type of digital advertising focusing on users who have previously visited your website. Since it targets those who have already expressed interest (with a website visit), it allows you to narrow your reach — especially compared to broad display advertising. When you use broad advertising tactics, you can’t ever be sure who will see your ads. Through retargeting, you can identify a person’s relevant attributes, such as behavior and firmographics, and use retargeting to customize his or her experience by presenting relevant content on display ad network sites.

Here are five ways you can optimize your ad spend with personalized retargeting:

1) Get Company-Specific

You can use information about your visitors, such as what country they are from, in ad retargeting. But what if you also knew which organizations they were coming from? You’d be a lot better equipped to run personalized campaigns that engage and target these prospects. With retargeting, you can actually present personalized ads to prospects from specific companies.

Here’s a look at a company-based retargeting dashboard from Google Analytics:

2) Get Industry-Specific

Using B2B analytics integration, personalized retargeting also allows you to see which industries your prospects are from. Once you know which industries you want to target, you can run A/B tests using various ads. Determine which version has the highest conversion rates, and reuse that content whenever you target companies within that industry. Here’s an ad personalized for the healthcare industry:

3) Focus on Key Accounts

Using Account-Based Marketing, a sales team might focus on a group of accounts with similar attributes, rather than a specific organization or industry. This could be a group of accounts within an industry, or simply named-account lists that your sales team can supply. Land those dream accounts by identifying and engaging target accounts with personalized content, messaging, and calls-to-action.

Here’s an example of an ad campaign personalized for Fortune 500 companies:

4) Drive Quality, Interested Prospects to Your Site

While creating new ads and fresh messaging is an important part of driving traffic to your company website, you also need to analyze which of your existing ads and messages are generating the quality prospects from the companies and industries you want. Once you’ve discovered your highest converting ads for these interested prospects, you’ll be able to leverage that messaging to drive more of these relevant prospects to your site — in both inbound and outbound marketing campaigns.

5) Target the Accounts that Matter

Once you’ve effectively analyzed the segments coming to your site, and you’ve fine-tuned your messaging to these most relevant accounts, you can optimize your retargeting budget to focus on the campaigns that drive the traffic you specifically want. It isn’t enough to allocate a digital marketing budget and hope for the best. With personalized retargeting, you can target, measure, and optimize your B2B ad spend,